Luise and her husband Ron, both veterans of CSIRO's cloud studies unit who moved to the coast in 2006, captured the unusual climatic event on their camera during it's 20 minute journey through the bay and to the east of Maloney's Beach.

Their pictures of the event have gone global with even The Guardian in the United Kingdom posting the pictures online.

Luise and Ron vividly described their close encounter with the water spout during an entertaining interview with 666 ABC's Genevieve Jacobs on the Afternoon show.

When Luise first spotted the spectacular funnel, she immediately yelled out to her husband, "Look at that! That's amazing, I've never seen anything like that before and it grew and grew and grew''.

Luise said the funnel was silent and spinning in a clockwise direction.

"It had touched the sea, and it was drawing the sea up," Luise said.

Ron has flown hundreds of hours through clouds in an ex-Royal Australian Air Force DC-3 and described the atmospheric build-up as "significant cumulus cloud".

"I'd say the clouds could have been going up as high as 10,000 feet at the top," Ron said.

ANU climatologist Janette Lindesay also spoke with Genevieve about the water spout and found Louise and Ron's description almost as exciting as the event itself.

"Oh my goodness that was a wonderful description,'' Dr Lindesay said. "I would have loved to have been there."

Dr Lindesay said water spouts occured when there was a warm layer of moist air above the sea trapped higher up by a cooler layer of air and clouds.

"The water that you see going up into the clouds, that makes the spout visible," Dr Lindesay said.

"The winds can be quite powerful there. So that kicks up water surface droplets and that makes the sort of meringue kind of impression that [Luise] was sort of describing. Then within the rising air that is going up towards the bottom of the cloud, the water vapour, the gaseous water that's actually in the air around us, is condensing and making cloud water droplets in the funnel and that's why we can see water droplets all the way up to the base of the cloud."

Dr Lindesay said water spouts were uncommon in sub-tropical areas.

But, a little disappointingly, she said there was no evidence to suggest that these climatic events actually scoop up fish and other marine life and unceremoniously drop those abducted creatures in distant locations.